The solitude that permeates The Stranger (L'Etranger) of
Albert
Camus (1913-1960) is neither the traditional solitude of eremitism nor
the ambient
solitude of wilderness but the modern psychological solitude
of
social and cultural alienation.

How can Meursault, the protagonist of the novel, so thoroughly
lack
consciousness of self or environment? The novel is not contrived:
Meursault is
the product of modern culture: aimless, purposeless, buffeted
by
material and social conditions, absent of any
capacity for reflectiveness or desire. His indifference is not
stoicism,
for
he appeals to no larger sense of nature or natural law. Nor is he a
defiant Diogenes scoffing at convention with crafted disdain.
Nor, finally, is Mersault's indifference that of a
philosophical
Ubermensch (though Camus is clearly influenced by Nietzsche),
transcending time and circumstance. The novel is strikingly
convincing because it echoes the world of Camus and his
contemporary Western environment. It announces the end of possibilities
in a clarion of
sentiment and thought rooted in what Camus called the Absurd.

In a later essay (The
Rebel), Camus described the absurd as
"an experience that must be lived through, a point of departure, the
equivalent, in existence, of Decartes' methodical doubt." By
the Absurd, Camus means only one thing: the gentle or
benign indifference of the universe, an indifference towards human
strivings, conflicts, beliefs, aspirations, biology, or dreams.
Nietzsche's
premise that God is dead, and the Dostoyevskyan protagonist Ivan
Karamazov's conclusion that therefore
everything is permitted, culminates in Camus's argument, demonstrated
by
the novel's plot, that alienation makes no counterpoint to pursuing
that which
may be permitted, for all ends the same way.

Meursault
is neither cynical nor hopeful. He expects nothing from life or people,
and cultivates nothing. One act is the same as another in the long run,
and morality will have to be based on liberty or autonomy, not order
and control. He is the modern anti-hero, reducing quests and
aspirations to ashes, like his literary counterparts, disaffecedt
office
clerks: Melville's Bartleby, Dostoyevsky's Underground Man,
Kafka's Joseph
K.,
Pessoa's Bernardo Soares, buffeted like flotsam in the indifferent
waves of the sea
and piercing sun (hence Camus' play on Meursault's name
"mer-sol"). The
urban disintegration, the colonial experience, the status of landless
rentier, humiliating routinized work, eking out a bare life with a few
acquaintances -- this is the protagonist of existentialist drama.

When the sun blinds Meursault in a fateful moment,
circumstances and
conditions overcome his autonomy, and he is found guilty of everything
in his life: his personality, his habits, his tolerance, his
indifference, his daily
life, as well as his crime. Camus extrapolates: nothing guides us, we
are on our own, we can trust nothing and no one, we are guilty of
everything because we persist in refusing the evidence of the Absurb
and contrive hierarchies and revere circles of power, ruthlessness,
and indifference. As Camus has put it in The Myth of Sisyphus:
"What
is absurd is the confrontation between the sense of the irrational and
the overwhelming desire for clarity which resounds in the depths of
men."

This
strangeness, this feeling of alienation, this uneasiness with the way
the world works so inexorably, is prompted by the banality of our
circumscribed and irrational world, the personal solitude we
experience,
the dependence we have on the hypocrisy around us.

Critic Robert Zaretsky (A
Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and
the Quest for Meaning; 2013) draws parallels between
Meursault/Camus and
Rousseau:

Meursault's imprisonment and trial -- the fatal events hurling him into
self-consciousness -- resemble Jean-Jacques Rousseau's depiction of
l'homme sauvage,
or natural man, tumbling fatefully into the state of
society. Like Camus, a French speaker who never felt at home in France
and a man torn his entire life between the opposing pulls of solitude
and solidarity, the Genevan-born Rousseau affirmed that man in his
natural state was the happiest of beings because he was, quite simply,
the dumbest of beings. He is a being whose "soul, agitated by nothing,
is given over to the sole sentiment of its present existence without
any idea of the future, however near it may be, and his projects, as
limited as his views, barely extend to the end of the day.

The natural man is living in the present by default,
not consciously. The eruption of past and future into present creates
consciousness, creates suffering and reflection. As Zaretsky puts it:
"Absurdity enters our life only when the prison door clangs shut -- or
when, from the heights of society we measure how far we have fallen."

Camus
does not mean for us to want to consciously mimic the coldness of
Meursault, his insensitivity, his perplexing lack of
consciousness,
but rather to perceive his final recognition of the necessity to
craft life given the indifference around us, to refuse to be
overwhelmed not by one's self and shortcomings but by everything else
around us. Meursault comes to this realization forced by circum-
stances
and very late in life, on the eve of his death. But he refuses to be
victimized, and fully embraces his utter solitude, for it is the only
thing left, the only thing which he controls. Meursault, in his jail
cell nearing the day of execution, reflects to himself:

I woke up with the stars in
my face. Sounds of he countryside were drifting in. Smells of night,
earth, and sale air were cooling my temples. The wondrous peace of that
sleeping summer flowed through me like a tide. Then, in the dark
hourbefore dawn, sirens blasted. There were announcing departures for a
world that now and forever meanth nothing to me. ...

For the first time, in that
night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle
indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself -- so like a
brother, really -- I felt that I had been happy and that I
was happy again. (Ward trans.)

Why such a sentiment, especially from a condemned
man? Meursault has put his finger to the pulse of society, and
perceived
its true face, how much it hates the solitude of any one person.
Society has demanded a mask and a merry performance of its norms, and
Meursault has failed by every social standard. Meursault goes so far as
to imagine "a crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they
greet me with cries of hate" to confirm his alienation and solitude.

But sometimes, too, the deeply-rooted sentiment of
alienation inhabits anyone embracing solitude; for
them, too, the world is indifferent at most, hateful at best. And
above, in the heavens, silence, and indifference. Camus was to find
increasingly absurd the nature of his times, but to break, too, from
those who refused the next step, away from the self-indulgent
existentialism of his fellows and towrds a philosophy of life that was
conscious. In The
Stranger, Camus show how we must reconcile the
realization of solitude with a life lived consciously and
deliberately,
realistically, and with our own quiet intuition.